After six weeks of building a robot to compete in regional competitions in San Jose State University (SJSU) and UC Davis, Robotics completed its “build” season on February 20.

Its regional competition at UC Davis will last from March 17 – 19, and two weeks later, the team will compete at SJSU from March 31 to April 2.

“To be perfectly frank, my objective this year is to win the annual regional competitions and qualify for the national competition in St. Louis,” Executive President Peter Gao (12) said. “We’ve been only semifinalists and finalists in the past year, but you have to be on the winning team and take first place to make it to the national competition.”

For the first time, the competition will include a “minibot,” which will autonomously race up a pole for bonus points at the end of the round.

“Now, we have two robots, and one of the things that we’re having trouble with is programming the minibot, because we have to do it at the right time,” Nicky Semenza (9) said. “It looks a little bit more complicated than competitions in the past.”

Last year, most of the parts to build the robot were not shipped until the fifth week, resulting in last-minute scrambles to complete the robot.

“This year, we decided to do all of our manufacturing in house,” said Jay Reddy (11), Vice President of the Electronics subteam. “That meant that we had a working robot by week three or four, and we could tune it to the point where it was equivalent to parts that we could have bought, but we manufactured them in lab, so we have more control over the production process.”

The competition, “Logomotion,” involves robots placing elements of the FIRST logo, a red triangle, white circle, and a blue square, onto rungs.

“After performing, prototyping, and testing, we were able to come to a bunch of components that worked, and we were able to assemble them into a final design, and it worked,” Simon Orr (10) said. “This year’s competition is more of a repeat of a competition from a few years back. We looked at what people did a few years back, and people who won.”

The robotics room was open until 9 p.m. on weeknights and from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on the weekends and during February Break. Team members were encouraged to attend for a few hours, while Presidents and Vice Presidents remained there for most of the day.